U.S. senator, Confederate attorney general, secretary of war, and
secretary of state. Born a British subject in the British West
Indies on August 6,1811, Benjamin was taken to the United States
in his early youth. The child of Sephardic Jewish settlers, he
was descended from families that could be traced Back to
fifteenth-century Spain.
Judah Benjamin's boyhood was much more steeped in Jewish culture
and tradition than either Southern or Jewish historians have
acknowledged. He was reared in Charleston, South Carolina, and
grew to manhood in New Orleans, two of the largest Jewish
communities in the United States in the early nineteenth century.
His father was one of the twelve dissenters in Charleston who
formed the first Reform Congregation of America. Although the
records of Beth Elohim congregation were burned and we cannot
know for certain, he probably was one of the first boys confirmed
at the new reform temple, which was founded when he was thirteen
years old. The character of a Jewish boy reared by a deeply
involved Jewish family would be shaped by that experience the
rest of his life.
He went to Yale Law School at fourteen, left under mysterious
circumstances, and was admitted to the Louisiana bar in 1832. A
strategic marriage to Natalie S. Martin, whose family belonged to
the ruling creole aristocracy in New Orleans, propelled him into
financial success and subsequently into a political career. He
participated in the explosive growth of New Orleans between 1820
and 1840 as a commercial lawyer and political advocate for
banking, finance, and railroad interests.
Benjamin prospered for a time as a sugar planter, helped organize
the Illinois Central Railroad, and was elected to the Louisiana
legislature in 1842. As a rising political star in the Whig
Party, he was the first acknowledged Jew to be elected to the
U.S. Senate (1852; reelected as a Democrat, 1858). In the Senate
he was noted as an eloquent defender of Southern interests and
has been ranked by some historians as one of the five great
orators in Senate history, the equal of Daniel Webster and John
C. Calhoun.
In Washington, he met Jefferson Davis (1853) and forged a
friendship in an unusual confrontation. They were both intense
and ambitious senators--Davis of Mississippi and Benjamin of
Louisiana. Varina Howell Davis, the future First Lady of the
Confederacy, wrote years later of them during this period,
"Sometimes when they did not agree on, a measure, hot words in
glacial, polite phrases passed between them." Because of a
suspected insult on the floor of the Senate Benjamin challenged
Davis to a duel. Davis quickly and publicly apologized, and the
incident of honor defended and satisfied drew them together in a
relationship of mutual respect.
His wife had taken his only daughter, Ninnette, and moved to
Paris in 1842. She joined him briefly after his election to the
Senate, but returned again to Paris because of scandalous rumors
about her in Washington. Thereafter Benjamin saw her once a year
on trips to Paris. Only a fragment of a letter remains between
them: "Speak nor to me of economy," she wrote. "It is so
fatiguing."
In the Senate, Benjamin was embroiled in the political turmoil
leading to the Civil War, and he was frequently attacked on the
basis of his religious background. Once in a debate on slavery
when Senator Ben Wade of Ohio accused Benjamin of being an
"Israelite with Egyptian principles," Benjamin is reported to
have replied, "It is true that I am a Jew, and when my ancestors
were receiving their Ten Commandments from the immediate Deity,
amidst the thunderings and lightnings of Mount Sinai, the
ancestors of my opponent were herding swine in the forest of
Great Britain." It was a rare reply. Usually, when newspapers,
political enemies, and military leaders insulted him with stinging phrases of religious prejudice, he almost never answered, but
simply retained what observers called "a perpetual smile."
After secession, President Jefferson Davis appointed Benjamin as
his attorney general on February 21, 1861. The president chose
him because, in Davis's own words, Benjamin "had a very high
reputation as a lawyer, and my acquaintance with him in the
Senate had impressed me with the lucidity of his intellect, his
systematic habits, and capacity for labor." Since the office of
attorney general was a civilian post, the leadership in the
capital considered it of little consequence, but this did not
deter Benjamin. He plunged into the cabinet policy debates on all
aspects of the Confederacy and developed a reputation as one who
loved details, complexity, and problem solving. He became the
administrator to the president, called by observers "the Poo
Bali" of the Confederate government At his first cabinet meeting,
Secretary of War Leroy P. Walker said, "there was only one man
there who had any sense, and that man was Benjamin." During his
tenure at the Justice Department, Benjamin became a strong
advocate of cotton diplomacy (the policy of shipping cotton to
Europe as barter for arms and supplies, and of denying cotton to
countries that did not support the South).
Davis then appointed Benjamin acting secretary of war in
September, making the appointment permanent on November 21. By
appointing a brilliant administrator without military experience,
Davis could thereby be his own secretary of war, a position he
had held in the Franklin Pierce administration. But Benjamin was
a failure because when the war went badly on the battlefield, the
military turned on him as a scapegoat. Frustrated generals who
could not attack the president publicly had a convenient target
in his secretary of war. As the Union forces struck back,
criticism of Benjamin mounted. He was not a military man, and his
orders, though flowing from constant meetings with the president,
were treated as originating from him and were resented in the
field as interference and amateurism.
Benjamin had highly publicized quarrels with Gen. P. G. T.
Beauregard and Gen. Thomas J. ("Stonewall") Jackson. Beauregard
called Benjamin in a letter to Davis "that functionary at his
desk, who deems it a fit time to write lectures on law while the
enemy is mustering at our front." Jackson threatened to resign,
writing Davis that "with such interference in my command, I
cannot be expected to be of much service in the field." Davis
defended his "right hand," as Varina described Benjamin, who was
working twelve and fourteen hours a day with Davis and was being
blamed by the military for carrying out the presidents orders.
Benjamin was berated by Northern generals as well. When Benjamin
Butler, who commanded the forces that conquered New Orleans,
issued a statement about the city, he said "the most effective
supporters of the Confederacy have been . . . mostly Jews . . .
who all deserve at the hands of the government what is due the
Jew Benjamin."
The anger against Benjamin came to a head after the fall of
Roanoke Island in early February 1862. Benjamin had been under
intense pressure from Gen. Henry A. Wise at Roanoke and Governor
Henry T. Clark of North Carolina to send many more men and arms
to the garrison there. He had resisted for reasons that would not
be known until twenty-five years after the war, and he accepted
the subsequent public condemnation in silence to protect his
country. Roanoke was sacrificed because to have done otherwise
would have revealed to the enemy just how desperate the South
was.
At the dedication of the Robert E. Lee monument in Richmond in
1890, Col. Charles Marshall, an aide-de-camp on General Lees
staff, read part of a letter from Benjamin, which revealed that
President Davis had agreed to allow Benjamin to be publicly
censured:

I consulted the President whether it was best for the country
that I should submit to unmerited censure or reveal to a
congressional Committee our poverty and my utter inability to
supply the requisitions of General Wise, and thus run the risk
that the fact should become known to some of the spies of the
enemy, of whose activity we were well assured. It was thought
best for the public service that I should suffer the blame in
silence and a report of censure on me was accordingly made by the
Committee of Congress.

When Benjamin resigned, Davis, as a reward for loyalty, promptly
named him secretary of state.
On the subject of slavery, both Davis and Benjamin were
"enlightened" Southerners whose attitudes were evolving. Most
Jewish historians have understandably reacted with revulsion to
the fact that Benjamin owned 140 slaves on a sugar plantation,
and they have been unable to consider the question of his views
on slavery with anything but embarrassed dismay. To comprehend
Benjamin on this score, one must put him into context as a
political figure against a backdrop of planter dogmatism and
abolitionist fervor.
Such an exploration leads directly to an extraordinary episode of
the war in which Benjamin played a central role: the effort to
persuade Davis to issue a Confederate emancipation proclamation,
which would promise slaves freedom in exchange for military service. That move, which began to take shape early in the war in
the minds of military and political leaders but did not surface
until 1864, is usually dismissed as a desperate gamble made at
the end of the war to lure Britain into the fight. But as
secretary of state, Benjamin's obsession all along had been to
draw England into the war. Slavery, however, was a stumbling
block because England had abolished slavery in 1833. As the
clouds of defeat gathered, Benjamin spoke before ten thousand
people in Richmond, delivering a remarkable speech in favor of a
Confederate offer to free slaves who would fight for the South.
Although the idea of arming slaves as soldiers was supported by
Lee, who needed more men in the field, the public and political
reaction was fierce. Howell Cobb, the former governor of Georgia,
wrote that "if slaves will make good soldiers, our whole theory
of slavery is wrong." Nevertheless, the Confederate Congress
passed a partial version of the measure on March 13, but by then
it was too late. Richmond fell less than a month later.
Benjamin's apparent change of personality after the war has
puzzled historians. The utter secrecy and privacy of his later
life is anomalous, given his earlier hunger for fame. No one can
ever know, but certainly one key to understanding his silence
after the war is his creation of a Confederate spy ring in Canada
and the subsequent proclamation, conceived by the Unions
secretary of war, Edwin Stanton, and issued by Lincoln's successor, President Andrew Johnson, for the arrest of Davis and seven
Canadian Confederate spies after the Lincoln assassination.
History, by means of the trials of the conspirators and by
exhaustive investigations, has absolved both Benjamin and Davis
from any responsibility. But the psychological and emotional
impact on Benjamin of the long period of hysteria that followed
the assassination must have taken its toll, especially since
Lincoln's death fell on Good Friday and 2,500 sermons were given
on Easter Sunday comparing Lincoln to a fallen Christ figure, as
the nation acted out a passion play. There is no record of what
Benjamin thought of the various published accusations against
him.
If Benjamin's role in history has been misjudged by historians
and was minimized even by participants, much of the
responsibility for that lies with Benjamin himself. He chose
obscurity early in the war with the unwavering decision that he
could best serve the South by serving Davis and remaining in the
presidential shadow. For reasons that have puzzled historians,
Benjamin burned his personal papers--some as be escaped from
Richmond in 1865 and almost all of the rest just before he
died--and be left only six scraps of paper at his death. One
historian has called him a "virtual incendiary."
Benjamin fled to England after the war and built a second career
as a successful international lawyer. He was called to the bar
(June 1866) after only five months residence and achieved
enormous financial success in his new home country. In 1868, he
wrote a classic treatise on commercial law in England (Treatise
on the Law of Sale of Personal Property) known even today to law
students as "Benjamin on Sales." In 1872, he became a queens
counsel, practicing with wig and robes in the House of Lords and
appearing in 136 major cases.
Although he had been known in the U.S. Senate as an outstanding
orator, in England be gave no published speeches on the war. He
left no articles, essays, or books about his role in the war or
any other aspect of it. Indeed, he made only two public
statements in nineteen years that concerned the war. The first
was a three-paragraph letter to the Times of London in September
1865, just after he arrived in England, protesting the
imprisonment of Jefferson Davis. The second was a short letter in
1883 contradicting the charge that millions of dollars in
Confederate funds were left in European banks under his control.
There were no letters defending strategy or admitting error; nor
does history record any war-related conversations with students
or scholars. He spent a few evenings at dinner with Davis when
the ex-president visited London five times between 1868 and 1883.
Otherwise, he avoided nostalgic encounters with friends from the
South. It is one of the enduring mysteries that Benjamin chose to
erase all ties to his previous life. In fact, he never even
returned to the United States.
Late in life, he retired and moved to Paris to be with his
family. Benjamin died on May 6,1884, and was buried in Pdre
Lachaise cemetery in Paris under tbe name of "Philippe Benjamin"
in the family plot of the Boursignac family, the in-laws of his
daughter. Three grandchildren died in childhood and no direct
descendants survived. In 1938, the Paris chapter of tbe Daughters
of the Confederacy finally provided an inscription to identify
the man in the almost anonymous grave:

JUDAH PHILIP BENJAMIN
BORN ST. THOMAS WEST INDIES AUGUST 6,1811
DIED IN PARIS MAY 6,1884
UNITED STATES SENATOR FROM LOUISIANA
ATTORNEY GENERAL, SECRETARY OF WAR AND
SECRETARY OF STATE OF THE CONFEDERATE STATES
OF AMERICA, QUEENS COUNSEL, LONDON

In life, as in death, he was elusive, vanishing behind his
agreeableness, his cordiality, his perpetual smile. To blend into
the culture--whether Southern or English--was bred into him, a
matter of the Jewish Southerners instinct for survival. The
public man celebrated on two continents sought a kind of
invisibility, not unlike the private man nobody knew. Shunning
his past, choosing an almost secret grave, with calculated
concealment, he nearly succeeded in remaining hidden from
history.
Since his death, Benjamin's life has remained relatively
unchallenged in the images that have come down through history.
Although historians have routinely called him "the brains of the
Confederacy," they know relatively little about him. Many
historians of the Civil War have referred to him as President
Davis's most loyal confidant, but Davis himself in his 1881
memoir of the Confederacy, referred to Benjamin in the most
perfunctory fashion, mentioning his name only twice in the l,5OO-page, two-volume work. That is especially odd if, as Varina Davis
testified in a letter written in 1889, Benjamin spent almost
every day in the office with her husband and was a central figure
in events.
Benjamin's image comes down through history as "the dark prince
of the Confederacy," a Mephisto-phelian Jewish figure. Stephen
Vincent Benet in John Brown's Body reflected the contemporary
view of him:

Judah P. Benjamin, the dapper Jew,
Seal-Sleek, black-eyed, lawyer and epicure,
Able, well-hated, face alive with life,
Looked round the council-chamber with the
slight
Perpetual smile he held before himself
Continually like a silk-ribbed fan.
Behind the fan, his quick, shrewd, fluid mind
Weighed Gentiles in an old balance. . . .

The mind behind the silk-ribbed fan
Was a dark-prince, clothed in an Eastern
stuff,
Whole brown hands cupped about a crystal
egg
That filmed with colored cloud. The eyes
stared,
searching.

"I am a Jew, What am I doing here?"

Pierce Butler in 1907 and Robert Douthat Meade in 1943 wrote the
two standard biographies of Benjamin in the first half of the
twentieth century, pulling together the thousands of Civil War
orders and letters to friends and family in England, France, New
Orleans, Charleston, and elsewhere that he was unable to destroy
after the war. Butler interviewed Benjamin's contemporaries,
including Varina Howell Davis. Meade spent twelve years
traveling--researching diaries, memoirs, and papers and interviewing
family members and friends. His hook revealed Benjamin to have been
a gifted tactician with a philosophical nature and an urbane
manner, a gourmet, an inveterate gambler, and a man whom women
adored. Still, it acknowledged a paucity of material.
Meade and Butler also drew from the research of the spare
beginnings of an unfinished biography by Francis Lawley, the
Richmond and Washington correspondent of the London Times during
the war, who became, according to Meade, "devoted to Benjamin, who
doubtless helped to color his vivid dispatches with a sympathetic
attitude toward the Confederacy." Benjamin kept up a relationship
with Lawley for the rest of his life, but only six pages survive of
the biography Lawley planned, along with fewer than a dozen
letters.
Meade and Butler were both Southern historians unfamiliar with
American Jewish history. Judaism for them represented strange and
unsteady territory that they, perhaps too deeply ingrained with the
attitudes of their time, were not prepared to explore. Butler, in
1907, treated Jewishness as if it were an unpleasant component of
his admiring portrait, one that he was reluctant but duty-bound to
include briefly. He referred to Benjamin's father as "that rara
avis, an unsuccessful Jew" and described Benjamin in England as
"this wonderful little Jew from America." Meade, writing during
that sensitive period of the rise of Nazi Germany just before World
War II, was more circumspect, yet observed that "like so many of
Jewish blood today, Benjamin tended to become cosmopolitan." In the
late 1930s, no Southern historian could convey the harshness of the
anti-Semitism surrounding Benjamin without seeming prejudiced
himself In a steady drumbeat of insults in Richmond, Confederate
opponents would later refer to Benjamin as "Judas Iscariot
Benjamin," and, according to Mary Boykin Chesnut's diary, "Mr.
Davis's pet Jew." The Jewish aspect of Benjamin's life and career
was not fully examined until it was taken up in a 1988 biography,
almost fifty years after the publication of Meades book.
Historians have pointed our ways in which Jews and Southerners were
alike--stepchildren of an anguished history and yet different.
Whereas the Jewish search for a homeland contrasted with the
Southerners commitment to place, Southern defenders of the
Confederacy often used Old Testament analogies in referring to
themselves as "the chosen people" destined to survive and triumph
against overwhelming odds. Benjamin is fascinating because of the
extraordinary role he played in Southern history and the ways in
which Jews and non-Jews reacted to him. He was the prototype of the
contradictions in the Jewish Southerner and the stranger in the
Confederate story, the Jew at the eye of the storm that was the
Civil War.
Objectively, with so few Jews in the South at the time, it is
astonishing that one should appear at the very center of Southern
history. Benjamin himself avoided his Jewishness throughout his
public career, though his enemies in the Southern press and in the
halls of the Confederate Congress never let the South forget it.
The virulence of the times required a symbolic figure as a catalyst
for an ancient hostility and perhaps contributed to his intentional
elusiveness. As Bertram Korn pointed out in American Jewry and the
Civil War, the nation both North and South experienced "the
greatest outpouring of Judeophobia in its history" during the Civil
War, and Benjamin was a convenient target.
Benjamin achieved greater political power than any other Jew in
the nineteenth century--perhaps even in all American history.
Although he was a non practicing Jew, he never attempted to deny
his faith and contemporary society treated him as Jewish. Benjamin
thus must stand as a symbol of American democracy and its openness
to religious minorities. In spite of the bigotry surrounding him,
not only was he elected to the U.S. Senate and appointed to three
high offices in the Confederacy, but he was also offered an
appointment as the ambassador to Spain and a seat on the U.S.
Supreme Court. The nineteenth-century emancipation of the Jews,
which began in Europe after the French Revolution, was as great a
shock to Jews as were the centuries of persecution that preceded
it. Benjamin was the main beneficiary of that emancipation and its
most visible symbol in America.
In the final years before the war, Benjamin was widely admired
nationally in both Jewish and non Jewish communities for his
prestige as a Southern leader and his eloquence as an orator. His
election to the U.S. Senate was a watershed for American Jews.
Because of the war, he became the first Jewish political figure to
be projected into the national consciousness. Jews in the South
were especially proud of his achievement because he validated their
legitimacy as Southerners. A pivotal figure in American Jewish history, Benjamin broke down the barriers of prejudice to achieve high
office. After him, it was more acceptable for Jews to be elected to
office and to aspire to service in the councils of national power.
Source: MacMillan Information Now Encyclopedia
"The Confederacy" Article by Eli N. Evans